Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:19 pm
Hillary Clinton isn’t settling for restoring the Voting Rights Act. The Democratic nominee has a plan to automatically and universally register voters that would kill the Republican Party.
On the 51st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic nominee said in a statement:
Fifty-one years after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, Americans are now facing the most systematic effort to curtail those rights since the era of Jim Crow. Make no mistake, new voter restriction laws in seventeen states have replaced poll taxes and literacy tests as a thinly veiled attempt to achieve an old objective: disenfranchising African Americans, Latinos, low-income people, young people, and people with disabilities.
But we are fighting back. Last week, a court struck down North Carolina’s voter ID requirement, saying it was designed to ‘target African Americans with almost surgical precision.’ Similar restrictions have recently been overturned in Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, North Dakota, and Kansas after courts found they were intended to discriminate as well.
This November, the notion that every American has a voice in shaping our future is at stake. Donald Trump supports discriminatory voting restrictions — and actually claims that without them in place, the results of American elections should be questioned. It’s a dangerous attempt to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy.
I have a very different view. I believe America is stronger when we expand access to the ballot box, not restrict it. That’s why I’ll fight to repair the Voting Rights Act, expand early voting, and introduce universal, automatic voter registration.
Upon signing the Voting Rights Act in 1965, President Johnson said the right to vote ‘is one which no American, true to our principles, can deny.’
He was right.
Universal automatic voter registration means that every American would be automatically registered to vote when they turn age 18. If a person does not want to be registered to vote, they can opt out. It doesn’t mean that voting is mandatory, or that voters have to stay registered.
What universal automatic voter registration would do is that it would immediately increase turnout for elections. Ever since demographic trends have been moving against them, Republicans have decided that their key to victory is to make the electorate smaller. In an attempt to hide their true motives, they’ve cooked up imaginary voter fraud as an excuse for voter suppression laws.
If universal automatic voter registration became the law, it would kill the current Republican Party. Republicans couldn’t be the small tent party of Trump. They would be forced to appeal to the broader electorate.
Restoring the Voting Rights Act is not enough. Democrats need to aim higher and set the goal at universal automatic voter registration. If Americans want to give the government back to the people, they first need to give all the people easy access to the ballot box.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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